The Light That Failed
by
Rudyard Kipling
Part 1 out of 5
Prepared by David Reed haradda@aol.com or davidr@inconnect.com
The Light That Failed
by Rudyard Kipling
CHAPTER I
So we settled it all when the storm was done
As comf'y as comf'y could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
Because I was only three;
And Teddy would run to the rainbow's foot,
Because he was five and a man;
And that's how it all began, my dears,
And that's how it all began. -- Big Barn Stories.
'WHAT do you think she'd do if she caught us? We oughtn't to have it,
you know,' said Maisie.
'Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom,' Dick answered, without
hesitation. 'Have you got the cartridges?'
"Yes; they're in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire
cartridges go off of their own accord?'
'Don't know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry
them.'
"I'm not afraid.' Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket
and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.
The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable
without pistol-practice. After much forethought and self-denial, Dick
had saved seven shillings and sixpence, the price of a badly constructed
Belgian revolver. Maisie could only contribute half a crown to the
syndicate for the purchase of a hundred cartridges. 'You can save better
than I can, Dick,' she explained; 'I like nice things to eat, and it
doesn't matter to you. Besides, boys ought to do these things.'
Dick grumbled a little at the arrangement, but went out and made the
purchase, which the children were then on their way to test. Revolvers
did not lie in the scheme of their daily life as decreed for them by the
guardian who was incorrectly supposed to stand in the place of a mother
to these two orphans. Dick had been under her care for six years, during
which time she had made her profit of the allowances supposed to be
expended on his clothes, and, partly through thoughtlessness, partly
through a natural desire to pain,--she was a widow of some years anxious
to marry again,--had made his days burdensome on his young shoulders.
Where he had looked for love, she gave him first aversion and then hate.
Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him
ridicule. The many hours that she could spare from the ordering of her
small house she devoted to what she called the home-training of Dick
Heldar. Her religion, manufactured in the main by her own intelligence
and a keen study of the Scriptures, was an aid to her in this matter. At
such times as she herself was not personally displeased with Dick, she
left him to understand that he had a heavy account to settle with his
Creator; wherefore Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as he
loathed Mrs. Jennett; and this is not a wholesome frame of mind for the
young. Since she chose to regard him as a hopeless liar, but an
economical and self-contained one, never throwing away the least
unnecessary fib, and never hesitating at the blackest, were it only
plausible, that might make his life a little easier. The treatment
taught him at least the power of living alone,--a power that was of
service to him when he went to a public school and the boys laughed at
his clothes, which were poor in quality and much mended. In the holidays
he returned to the teachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the chain of
discipline might not be weakened by association with the world, was
generally beaten, on one account or another, before he had been twelve
hours under her roof.
The autumn of one year brought him a companion in bondage, a
long-haired, gray-eyed little atom, as self-contained as himself, who
moved about the house silently and for the first few weeks spoke only to
the goat that was her chiefest friend on earth and lived in the
back-garden. Mrs. Jennett objected to the goat on the grounds that he
was un-Christian,--which he certainly was. 'Then,' said the atom,
choosing her words very deliberately, 'I shall write to my
lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma is
mine, mine, mine!' Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where
certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as
clearly as Dick what this meant. 'I have been beaten before,' she said,
still in the same passionless voice; 'I have been beaten worse than you
can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and
tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of
you.' Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a pause
to assure herself that all danger of war was past, went out, to weep
bitterly on Amomma's neck.
Dick learned to know her as Maisie, and at first mistrusted her
profoundly, for he feared that she might interfere with the small
liberty of action left to him. She did not, however; and she volunteered
no friendliness until Dick had taken the first steps. Long before the
holidays were over, the stress of punishment shared in common drove the
children together, if it were only to play into each other's hands as
they prepared lies for Mrs. Jennett's use. When Dick returned to school,
Maisie whispered, 'Now I shall be all alone to take care of myself;
but,' and she nodded her head bravely, 'I can do it. You promised to
send Amomma a grass collar. Send it soon.' A week later she asked for
that collar by return of post, and wa not pleased when she learned that
it took time to make. When at last Dick forwarded the gift, she forgot
to thank him for it.
Many holidays had come and gone since that day, and Dick had grown into
a lanky hobbledehoy more than ever conscious of his bad clothes. Not for
a moment had Mrs. Jennett relaxed her tender care of him, but the
average canings of a public school--Dick fell under punishment about
three times a month--filled him with contempt for her powers. 'She
doesn't hurt,' he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, 'and
she is kinder to you after she has whacked me.' Dick shambled through
the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the
school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit them,
cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than once try
to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. 'We are both
miserable as it is,' said she. 'What is the use of trying to make things
worse? Let's find things to do, and forget things.'
The pistol was the outcome of that search. It could only be used on the
muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and
pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out
nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks, touched
by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed. It was late in the
afternoon when Dick and Maisie arrived on their ground, Amomma trotting
patiently behind them.
'Mf!' said Maisie, sniffing the air. 'I wonder what makes the sea so
smelly? I don't like it!'
'You never like anything that isn't made just for you,' said Dick
bluntly. 'Give me the cartridges, and I'll try first shot. How far does
one of these little revolvers carry?'
'Oh, half a mile,' said Maisie, promptly. 'At least it makes an awful
noise. Be careful with the cartridges; I don't like those jagged
stick-up things on the rim. Dick, do be careful.'
'All right. I know how to load. I'll fire at the breakwater out there.'
He fired, and Amomma ran away bleating. The bullet threw up a spurt of
mud to the right of the wood-wreathed piles.
'Throws high and to the right. You try, Maisie. Mind, it's loaded all
round.'
Maisie took the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud,
her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left eye screwed up.
Dick sat down on a tuft of bank and laughed. Amomma returned very
cautiously. He was accustomed to strange experiences in his afternoon
walks, and, finding the cartridge-box unguarded, made investigations
with his nose. Maisie fired, but could not see where the bullet went.
'I think it hit the post,' she said, shading her eyes and looking out
across the sailless sea.
'I know it has gone out to the Marazion Bell-buoy,' said Dick, with a
chuckle. 'Fire low and to the left; then perhaps you'll get it. Oh, look
at Amomma!--he's eating the cartridges!'
Maisie turned, the revolver in her hand, just in time to see Amomma
scampering away from the pebbles Dick threw after him. Nothing is sacred
to a billy-goat. Being well fed and the adored of his mistress, Amomma
had naturally swallowed two loaded pin-fire cartridges. Maisie hurried
up to assure herself that Dick had not miscounted the tale.
'Yes, he's eaten two.'
'Horrid little beast! Then they'll joggle about inside him and blow up,
and serve him right. . . . Oh, Dick! have I killed you?'
Revolvers are tricky things for young hands to deal with. Maisie could
not explain how it had happened, but a veil of reeking smoke separated
her from Dick, and she was quite certain that the pistol had gone off in
his face. Then she heard him sputter, and dropped on her knees beside
him, crying, 'Dick, you aren't hurt, are you? I didn't mean it.'
'Of course you didn't, said Dick, coming out of the smoke and wiping his
cheek. 'But you nearly blinded me. That powder stuff stings awfully.' A
neat little splash of gray led on a stone showed where the bullet had
gone. Maisie began to whimper.
'Don't,' said Dick, jumping to his feet and shaking himself. 'I'm not a
bit hurt.'
'No, but I might have killed you,' protested Maisie, the corners of her
mouth drooping. 'What should I have done then?'
'Gone home and told Mrs. Jennett.' Dick grinned at the thought; then,
softening, 'Please don't worry about it. Besides, we are wasting time.
We've got to get back to tea. I'll take the revolver for a bit.'
Maisie would have wept on the least encouragement, but Dick's
indifference, albeit his hand was shaking as he picked up the pistol,
restrained her. She lay panting on the beach while Dick methodically
bombarded the breakwater. 'Got it at last!' he exclaimed, as a lock of
weed flew from the wood.
'Let me try,' said Maisie, imperiously. 'I'm all right now.'
They fired in turns till the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself
to pieces, and Amomma the outcast--because he might blow up at any
moment--browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown at
him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool which was
commanded by the seaward slope of Fort Keeling, and they sat down
together before this new target.
'Next holidays,' said Dick, as the now thoroughly fouled revolver kicked
wildly in his hand, 'we'll get another pistol,--central fire,--that will
carry farther.'
'There won't b any next holidays for me,' said Maisie. 'I'm going away.'
'Where to?'
'I don't know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I've got to
be educated somewhere,--in France, perhaps,--I don't know where; but I
shall be glad to go away.'
'I shan't like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie,
is it really true you're going? Then these holidays will be the last I
shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I
wish----'
The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking
grass-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy
nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and the
milk-white sea beyond.
'I wish,' she said, after a pause, 'that I could see you again sometime.
You wish that, too?'
'Yes, but it would have been better if--if--you had--shot straight over
there--down by the breakwater.'
Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy who
only ten days before had decorated Amomma's horns with cut-paper
ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public
ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.
'Don't be stupid,' she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct
attacked the side-issue. 'How selfish you are! Just think what I should
have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I'm quite miserable
enough already.'
'Why? Because you're going away from Mrs. Jennett?'
'No.'
'From me, then?'
No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though
he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this
the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.
'I don't know,' she said. 'I suppose it is.'
'Maisie, you must know. I'm not supposing.'
'Let's go home,' said Maisie, weakly.
But Dick was not minded to retreat.
'I can't say things,' he pleaded, 'and I'm awfully sorry for teasing you
about Amomma the other day. It's all different now, Maisie, can't you
see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of leaving
me to find out.'
'You didn't. I did tell. Oh, Dick, what's the use of worrying?'
'There isn't any; but we've been together years and years, and I didn't
know how much I cared.'
'I don't believe you ever did care.'
'No, I didn't; but I do,--I care awfully now, Maisie,' he
gulped,--'Maisie, darling, say you care too, please.'
'I do, indeed I do; but it won't be any use.'
'Why?'
'Because I am going away.'
'Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say--will you?' A second
'darling' came to his lips more easily than the first. There were few
endearments in Dick's home or school life; he had to find them by
instinct. Dick caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of
the revolver.
'I promise,' she said solemnly; 'but if I care there is no need for
promising.'
'And do you care?' For the first time in the past few minutes their eyes
met and spoke for them who had no skill in speech. . . .
'Oh, Dick, don't! Please don't! It was all right when we said
good-morning; but now it's all different!' Amomma looked on from afar.
He had seen his property quarrel frequently, but he had never seen
kisses exchanged before. The yellow sea-poppy was wiser, and nodded its
head approvingly. Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but since it
was the first, other than those demanded by duty, in all the world that
either had ever given or taken, it opened to them new worlds, and every
one of them glorious, so that they were lifted above the consideration
of any worlds at all, especially those in which tea is necessary, and
sat still, holding each other's hands and saying not a word.
'You can't forget now,' said Dick, at last. There was that on his cheek
that stung more than gunpowder.
'I shouldn't have forgotten anyhow,' said Maisie, and they looked at
each other and saw that each was changed from the companion of an hour
ago to a wonder and a mystery they could not understand. The sun began
to set, and a night-wind thrashed along the bents of the foreshore.
'We shall be awfully late for tea,' said Maisie. 'Let's go home.'
'Let's use the rest of the cartridges first,' said Dick; and he helped
Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea,--a descent that she was
quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took the
grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away, and
Dick blushed.
'It's very pretty,' he said.
'Pooh!' said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood
close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired over
the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was
protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across
the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red
disc. The light held Dick's attention for a moment, and as he raised his
revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in that
he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an
indefinite length of time till such date as---- A gust of the growing
wind drove the girl's long black hair across his face as she stood with
her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma 'a little beast,' and for a
moment he was in the dark,--a darkness that stung. The bullet went
singing out to the empty sea.
'Spoilt my aim,' said he, shaking his head. 'There aren't any more
cartridges; we shall have to run home.' But they did not run. They
walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to
them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his
inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden
heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their
years.
'And I shall be----' quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: 'I
don't know what I shall be. I don't seem to be able to pass any exams,
but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho!'
'Be an artist, then,' said Maisie. 'You're always laughing at my trying
to draw; and it will do you good.'
'I'll never laugh at anything you do,' he answered. 'I'll be an artist,
and I'll do things.'
'Artists always want money, don't they?'
'I've got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians
tell me I'm to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin
with.'
'Ah, I'm rich,' said Maisie. 'I've got three hundred a year all my own
when I'm twenty-one. That's why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is
to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me,--just a
father or a mother.'
'You belong to me,' said Dick, 'for ever and ever.'
'Yes, we belong--for ever. It's very nice.' She squeezed his arm. The
kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only
just see the profile of Maisie's cheek with the long lashes veiling the
gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had
been boggling over for the last two hours.
'And I--love you, Maisie,' he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to
ring across the world,--the world that he would to-morrow or the next
day set out to conquer.
There was a scene, not, for the sake of discipline, to be reported, when
Mrs. Jennett would have fallen upon him, first for disgraceful
unpunctuality, and secondly for nearly killing himself with a forbidden
weapon.
'I was playing with it, and it went off by itself,' said Dick, when the
powder-pocked cheek could no longer be hidden, 'but if you think you're
going to lick me you're wrong. You are never going to touch me again.
Sit down and give me my tea. You can't cheat us out of that, anyhow.'
Mrs. Jennett gasped and became livid. Maisie said nothing, but
encouraged Dick with her eyes, and he behaved abominably all that
evening. Mrs. Jennett prophesied an immediate judgment of Providence and
a descent into Tophet later, but Dick walked in Paradise and would not
hear. Only when he was going to bed Mrs. Jennett recovered and asserted
herself. He had bidden Maisie good-night with down-dropped eyes and from
a distance.
'If you aren't a gentleman you might try to behave like one,' said Mrs.
Jennett, spitefully. 'You've been quarrelling with Maisie again.'
This meant that the usual good-night kiss had been omitted. Maisie,
white to the lips, thrust her cheek forward with a fine air of
indifference, and was duly pecked by Dick, who tramped out of the room
red as fire. That night he dreamed a wild dream. He had won all the
world and brought it to Maisie in a cartridge-box, but she turned it
over with her foot, and, instead of saying 'Thank you,' cried--
'Where is the grass collar you promised for Amomma? Oh, how selfish you
are!'?
CHAPTER II
Then we brought the lances down, then the bugles blew,
When we went to Kandahar, ridin' two an' two,
Ridin', ridin', ridin', two an' two,
Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra,
All the way to Kandahar, ridin' two an' two.
--Barrack-Room Ballad.
'I'M NOT angry with the British public, but I wish we had a few
thousand of them scattered among these rooks. They wouldn't be in such
a hurry to get at their morning papers then. Can't you imagine the
regulation householder--Lover of Justice, Constant Reader,
Paterfamilias, and all that lot--frizzling on hot gravel?'
'With a blue veil over his head, and his clothes in strips. Has any man
here a needle? I've got a piece of sugar-sack.'
'I'll lend you a packing-needle for six square inches of it then. Both my
knees are worn through.'
'Why not six square acres, while you're about it? But lend me the needle,
and I'll see what I can do with the selvage. I don't think there's enough to
protect my royal body from the cold blast as it is. What are you doing
with that everlasting sketch-book of yours, Dick?'
'Study of our Special Correspondent repairing his wardrobe,' said Dick,
gravely, as the other man kicked off a pair of sorely worn
riding-breeches and began to fit a square of coarse canvas over the most
obvious open space. He grunted disconsolately as the vastness of the void
developed itself.
'Sugar-bags, indeed! Hi! you pilot man there! lend me all the sails for
that whale-boat.'
A fez-crowned head bobbed up in the stern-sheets, divided itself into
exact halves with one flashing grin, and bobbed down again. The man of
the tattered breeches, clad only in a Norfolk jacket and a gray flannel
shirt, went on with his clumsy sewing, while Dick chuckled over the
sketch.
Some twenty whale-boats were nuzzling a sand-bank which was dotted
with English soldiery of half a dozen corps, bathing or washing their
clothes. A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags, and
flour- and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the
whale-boats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental
carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient
allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of
the boat herself.
'First the bloomin' rudder snaps,' said he to the world in general; 'then
the mast goes; an' then, s' 'help me, when she can't do nothin' else, she
opens 'erself out like a cock-eyes Chinese lotus.'
'Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are,' said the tailor,
without looking up. 'Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop again.'
There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it
raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half a
mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would
drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent
of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next few
miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The desert
ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black
hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose
touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks
past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid
had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the
rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very nearly of
time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do
something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the
other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town called
Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert, or in one
of the many deserts; there were yet more columns waiting to embark on
the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and Assuan; there
were lies and rumours running over the face of the hopeless land from
Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed generally that there
must be some one in authority to direct the general scheme of the many
movements. The duty of that particular river-column was to keep the
whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling on the villagers' crops
when the gangs 'tracked' the boats with lines thrown from midstream, to
get as much sleep and food as was possible, and, above all, to press on
without delay in the teeth of the churning Nile.
With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the
newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But
it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be
amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or
half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign
was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid word-painting. Now and
again a 'Special' managed to get slain,--which was not altogether a
disadvantage to the paper that employed him,--and more often the
hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which
were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were
many correspondents with many corps and columns,--from the veterans
who had followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in '82,
what time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first
miserable work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and
the scrub swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at
the end of a telegraph-wire to take the places of their betters killed or
invalided.
Among the seniors--those who knew every shift and change in the
perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest
Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk a
telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of a newly
appointed staff-officer when press regulations became burdensome--was
the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed Torpenhow. He
represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the campaign, as he had
represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere. The syndicate did not
concern itself greatly with criticisms of attack and the like. It supplied
the masses, and all it demanded was picturesqueness and abundance of
detail; for there is more joy in England over a soldier who
insubordinately steps out of square to rescue a comrade than over twenty
generals slaving even to baldness at the gross details of transport and
commissariat.
He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently
abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of
shell-torn bodies on the gravel plain.
'What are you for?' said Torpenhow. The greeting of the correspondent
is that of the commercial traveller on the road.
'My own hand,' said the young man, without looking up. 'Have you any
tobacco?'
Torpenhow waited till the sketch was finished, and when he had looked
at it said, 'What's your business here?'
'Nothing; there was a row, so I came. I'm supposed to be doing something
down at the painting-slips among the boats, or else I'm in charge of the
condenser on one of the water-ships. I've forgotten which.'
'You've cheek enough to build a redoubt with,' said Torpenhow, and took
stock of the new acquaintance. 'Do you always draw like that?'
The young man produced more sketches. 'Row on a Chinese pig-boat,'
said he, sententiously, showing them one after another.--'Chief mate
dirked by a comprador.--Junk ashore off Hakodate.--Somali muleteer
being flogged.--Star-shelled bursting over camp at Berbera.--Slave-dhow
being chased round Tajurrah Bah.--Soldier lying dead in the moonlight
outside Suakin.--throat cut by Fuzzies.'
'H'm!' said Torpenhow, 'can't say I care for Verestchagin-and-water
myself, but there's no accounting for tastes. Doing anything now, are
you?'
'No. I'm amusing myself here.'
Torpenhow looked at the sketches again, and nodded. 'Yes, you're right
to take your first chance when you can get it.'
He rode away swiftly through the Gate of the Two War-Ships, rattled
across the causeway into the town, and wired to his syndicate, 'Got man
here, picture-work. Good and cheap. Shall I arrange? Will do letterpress
with sketches.'
The man on the redoubt sat swinging his legs and murmuring, 'I knew
the chance would come, sooner or later. By Gad, they'll have to sweat for
it if I come through this business alive!'
In the evening Torpenhow was able to announce to his friend that the
Central Southern Agency was willing to take him on trial, paying
expenses for three months. 'And, by the way, what's your name?' said
Torpenhow.
'Heldar. Do they give me a free hand?'
'They've taken you on chance. You must justify the choice. You'd better
stick to me. I'm going up-country with a column, and I'll do what I can
for you. Give me some of your sketches taken here, and I'll send 'em
along.' To himself he said, 'That's the best bargain the Central southern
has ever made; and they got me cheaply enough.'
So it came to pass that, after some purchase of horse-flesh and
arrangements financial and political, Dick was made free of the New and
Honourable Fraternity of war correspondents, who all possess the
inalienable right of doing as much work as they can and getting as much
for it as Providence and their owners shall please. To these things are
added in time, if the brother be worthy, the power of glib speech that
neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question,
the eye of a horse-cope, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a bullock,
the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite adaptability to all
circumstances. But many die before they attain to this degree, and the
past-masters in the craft appear for the most part in dress-clothes when
they are in England, and thus their glory is hidden from the multitude.
Dick followed Torpenhow wherever the latter's fancy chose to lead him,
and between the two they managed to accomplish some work that almost
satisfied themselves. It was not an easy life in any way, and under its
influence the two were drawn ver closely together, for they ate from the
same dish, they shared the same water-bottle, and, most binding tie of all,
their mails went off together. It was Dick who managed to make
gloriously drunk a telegraph-clerk in a palm hut far beyond the Second
Cataract, and, while the man lay in bliss on the floor, possessed himself of
some laboriously acquired exclusive information, forwarded by a
confiding correspondent of an opposition syndicate, made a careful
duplicate of the matter, and brought the result to Torpenhow, who said
that all was fair in love or war correspondence, and built an excellent
descriptive article from his rival's riotous waste of words. It was
Torpenhow who--but the tale of their adventures, together and apart,
from Philae to the waste wilderness of Herawi and Muella, would fill
many books. They had been penned into a square side by side, in deadly
fear of being shot by over-excited soldiers; they had fought with
baggage-camels in the chill dawn; they had jogged along in silence under
blinding sun on indefatigable little Egyptian horses; and they had
floundered on the shallows of the Nile when the whale-boat in which they
had found a berth chose to hit a hidden rock and rip out half her
bottom-planks.
Now they were sitting on the sand-bank, and the whale-boats were
bringing up the remainder of the column.
'Yes,' said Torpenhow, as he put the last rude stitches into his
over-long-neglected gear, 'it has been a beautiful business.'
'The patch or the campaign?' said Dick. 'Don't think much of either,
myself.'
'You want the Euryalus brought up above the Third Cataract, don't you?
and eighty-one-ton guns at Jakdul? Now, I'm quite satisfied with my
breeches.' He turned round gravely to exhibit himself, after the manner
of a clown.
'It's very pretty. Specially the lettering on the sack. G.B.T. Government
Bullock Train. That's a sack from India.'
'It's my initials,--Gilbert Belling Torpenhow. I stole the cloth on purpose.
What the mischief are the camel-corps doing yonder?' Torpenhow
shaded his eyes and looked across the scrub-strewn gravel.
A bugle blew furiously, and the men on the bank hurried to their arms
and accoutrements.
'"Pisan soldiery surprised while bathing,"' remarked Dick, calmly.
'D'you remember the picture? It's by Michael Angelo; all beginners copy
it. That scrub's alive with enemy.'
The camel-corps on the bank yelled to the infantry to come to them, and
a hoarse shouting down the river showed that the remainder of the
column had wind of the trouble and was hastening to take share in it. As
swiftly as a reach of still water is crisped by the wind, the rock-strewn
ridges and scrub-topped hills were troubled and alive with armed men.
Mercifully, it occurred to these to stand far off for a time, to shout and
gesticulate joyously. One man even delivered himself of a long story. The
camel-corps did not fire. They were only too glad of a little
breathing-space, until some sort of square could be formed. The men on
the sand-bank ran to their side; and the whale-boats, as they toiled up
within shouting distance, were thrust into the nearest bank and emptied
of all save the sick and a few men to guard them. The Arab orator ceased
his outcries, and his friends howled.
'They look like the Mahdi's men,' said Torpenhow, elbowing himself into
the crush of the square; 'but what thousands of 'em there are! The tribes
hereabout aren't against us, I know.'
'Then the Mahdi's taken another town,' said Dick, 'and set all these
yelping devils free to show us up. Lend us your glass.'
'Our scouts should have told us of this. We've been trapped,' said a
subaltern. 'Aren't the camel guns ever going to begin? Hurry up, you
men!'
There was no need of any order. The men flung themselves panting
against the sides of the square, for they had good reason to know that
whoso was left outside when the fighting began would very probably die
in an extremely unpleasant fashion. The little hundred-and-fifty-pound
camel-guns posted at one corner of the square opened the ball as the
square moved forward by its right to get possession of a knoll of rising
ground. All had fought in this manner many times before, and there was
no novelty in the entertainment; always the same hot and stifling
formation, the smell of dust and leather, the same boltlike rush of the
enemy, the same pressure on the weakest side, the few minutes of
hand-to-hand scuffle, and then the silence of the desert, broken only by
the yells of those whom their handful of cavalry attempted to purse. They
had become careless. The camel-guns spoke at intervals, and the square
slouched forward amid the protesting of the camels. Then came the
attack of three thousand men who had not learned from books that it is
impossible for troops in close order to attack against breech-loading fire.
A few dropping shots heralded their approach, and a few horsemen led,
but the bulk of the force was naked humanity, mad with rage, and armed
with the spear and the sword. The instinct of the desert, where there is
always much war, told them that the right flank of the square was the
weakest, for they swung clear of the front. The camel-guns shelled them
as they passed and opened for an instant lanes through their midst, most
like those quick-closing vistas in a Kentish hop-garden seen when the
train races by at full speed; and the infantry fire, held till the opportune
moment, dropped them in close-packing hundreds. No civilised troops in
the world could have endured the hell through which they came, the
living leaping high to avoid the dying who clutched at their heels, the
wounded cursing and staggering forward, till they fell--a torrent black as
the sliding water above a mill-dam--full on the right flank of the square.
Then the line of the dusty troops and the faint blue desert sky overhead
went out in rolling smoke, and the little stones on the heated ground ant
the tinder-dry clumps of scrub became matters of surpassing interest, for
men measured their agonised retreat and recovery by these things,
counting mechanically and hewing their way back to chosen pebble and
branch. There was no semblance of any concerted fighting. For aught the
men knew, the enemy might be attempting all four sides of the square at
once. Their business was to destroy what lay in front of them, to bayonet
in the back those who passed over them, and, dying, to drag down the
slayer till he could be knocked on the head by some avenging gun-butt.
Dick waited with Torpenhow and a young doctor till the stress grew
unendurable. It was hopeless to attend to the wounded till the attack was
repulsed, so the three moved forward gingerly towards the weakest side
of the square. There was a rush from without, the short hough-hough of
the stabbing spears, and a man on a horse, followed by thirty or forty
others, dashed through, yelling and hacking. The right flank of the
square sucked in after them, and the other sides sent help. The wounded,
who knew that they had but a few hours more to live, caught at the
enemy's feet and brought them down, or, staggering into a discarded
rifle, fired blindly into the scuffle that raged in the centre of the square.
Dick was conscious that somebody had cut him violently across his
helmet, that he had fired his revolver into a black, foam-flecked face
which forthwith ceased to bear any resemblance to a face, and that
Torpenhow had gone down under an Arab whom he had tried to 'collar
low,' and was turning over and over with his captive, feeling for the
man's eyes. The doctor jabbed at a venture with a bayonet, and a
helmetless soldier fired over Dick's shoulder: the flying grains of powder
stung his cheek. It was to Torpenhow that Dick turned by instinct. The
representative of the Central Southern Syndicate had shaken himself
clear of his enemy, and rose, wiping his thumb on his trousers. The Arab,
both hands to his forehead, screamed aloud, then snatched up his spear
and rushed at Torpenhow, who was panting under shelter of Dick's
revolver. Dick fired twice, and the man dropped limply. His upturned
face lacked one eye. The musketry-fire redoubled, but cheers mingled
with it. The rush had failed and the enemy were flying. If the heart of the
square were shambles, the ground beyond was a butcher's shop. Dick
thrust his way forward between the maddened men. The remnant of the
enemy were retiring, as the few--the very few--English cavalry rode
down the laggards.
Beyond the lines of the dead, a broad blood-stained Arab spear cast aside
in the retreat lay across a stump of scrub, and beyond this again the
illimitable dark levels of the desert. The sun caught the steel and turned
it into a red disc. Some one behind him was saying, 'Ah, get away, you
brute!' Dick raised his revolver and pointed towards the desert. His eye
was held by the red spash in the distance, and the clamour about him
seemed to die down to a very far-away whisper, like the whisper of a
level sea. There was the revolver and the red light. . . . and the voice of
some one scaring something away, exactly as had fallen somewhere
before,--a darkness that stung. He fired at random, and the bullet went
out across the desert as he muttered, 'Spoilt my aim. There aren't any
more cartridges. We shall have to run home.' He put his hand to his head
and brought it away covered with blood.
'Old man, you're cut rather badly,' said Torpenhow. 'I owe you
something for this business. Thanks. Stand up! I say, you can't be ill
here.'
Throughout the night, when the troops were encamped by the
whale-boats, a black figure danced in the strong moonlight on the
sand-bar and shouted that Khartoum the accursed one was dead,--was
dead,--was dead,--that two steamers were rock-staked on the Nile outside
the city, and that of all their crews there remained not one; and
Khartoum was dead,--was dead,--was dead!
But Torpenhow took no heed. He was watching Dick, who called aloud to
the restless Nile for Maisie,--and again Maisie!?
'Behold a phenomenon,' said Torpenhow, rearranging the blanket. 'Here
is a man, presumably human, who mentions the name of one woman
only. And I've seen a good deal of delirium, too.--Dick, here's some fizzy
drink.'
'Thank you, Maisie,' said Dick.
CHAPTER III
So he thinks he shall take to the sea again
For one more cruise with his buccaneers,
To singe the beard of the King of Spain,
And capture another Dean of Jaen
And sell him in Algiers.--A Dutch Picture. Longfellow
THE SOUDAN campaign and Dick's broken head had been some months
ended and mended, and the Central Southern Syndicate had paid Dick a
certain sum on account for work done, which work they were careful to
assure him was not altogether up to their standard. Dick heaved the
letter into the Nile at Cairo, cashed the draft in the same town, and bade
a warm farewell to Torpenhow at the station.
'I am going to lie up for a while and rest,' said Torpenhow. 'I don't know
where I shall live in London, but if God brings us to meet, we shall meet.
Are you starying here on the off-chance of another row? There will be
none till the Southern Soudan is reoccupied by our troops. Mark that.
Good-bye; bless you; come back when your money's spent; and give me
your address.'
Dick loitered in Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailia, and Port Said,--especially
Port Said. There is iniquity in many parts of the world, and vice in all,
but the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the vices in all
the continents finds itself at Port Said. And through the heart of that
sand-bordered hell, where the mirage flickers day long above the Bitter
Lake, move, if you will only wait, most of the men and women you have
known in this life. Dick established himself in quarters more riotous than
respectable. He spent his evenings on the quay, and boarded many ships,
and saw very many friends,--gracious Englishwomen with whom he had
talked not too wisely in the veranda of Shepherd's Hotel, hurrying war
correspondents, skippers of the contract troop-ships employed in the
campaign, army officers by the score, and others of less reputable trades.
He had choice of all the races of the East and West for studies, and the
advantage of seeing his subjects under the influence of strong excitement,
at the gaming-tables, saloons, dancing-hells, and elsewhere. For
recreation there was the straight vista of the Canal, the blazing sands,
the procession of shipping, and the white hospitals where the English
soldiers lay. He strove to set down in black and white and colour all that
Providence sent him, and when that supply was ended sought about for
fresh material. It was a fascinating employment, but it ran away with his
money, and he had drawn in advance the hundred and twenty pounds to
which he was entitled yearly. 'Now I shall have to work and starve!'
thought he, and was addressing himself to this new fate when a
mysterious telegram arrived from Torpenhow in England, which said,
'Come back, quick; you have caught on. Come.'
A large smile overspread his face. 'So soon! that's a good hearing,' said
he to himself. 'There will be an orgy to-night. I'll stand or fall by my
luck. Faith, it's time it came!' He deposited half of his funds in the hands
of his well-known friends Monsieur and Madame Binat, and ordered
himself a Zanzibar dance of the finest. Monsieur Binat was shaking with
drink, but Madame smiles sympathetically--
'Monsieur needs a chair, of course, and of course Monsieur will sketch;
Monsieur amuses himself strangely.'
Binat raised a blue-white face from a cot in the inner room. 'I
understand,' he quavered. 'We all know Monsieur. Monsieur is an artist,
as I have been.' Dick nodded. 'In the end,' said Binat, with gravity,
'Monsieur will descend alive into hell, as I have descended.' And he
laughed.
'You must come to the dance, too,' said Dick; 'I shall want you.'
'For my face? I knew it would be so. For my face? My God! and for my
degradation so tremendous! I will not. Take him away. He is a devil. Or
at least do thou, Celeste, demand of him more.' The excellent Binat began
to kick and scream.
'All things are for sale in Port Said,' said Madame. 'If my husband comes
it will be so much more. Eh, 'how you call--'alf a sovereign.'
The money was paid, and the mad dance was held at night in a walled
courtyard at the back of Madame Binat's house. The lady herself, in
faded mauve silk always about to slide from her yellow shoulders, played
the piano, and to the tin-pot music of a Western waltz the naked
Zanzibari girls danced furiously by the light of kerosene lamps. Binat sat
upon a chair and stared with eyes that saw nothing, till the whirl of the
dance and the clang of the rattling piano stole into the drink that took the
place of blood in his veins, and his face glistened. Dick took him by the
chin brutally and turned that face to the light. Madame Binat looked
over her shoulder and smiled with many teeth. Dick leaned against the
wall and sketched for an hour, till the kerosene lamps began to smell, and
the girls threw themselves panting on the hard-beaten ground. Then he
shut his book with a snap and moved away, Binat plucking feebly at his
elbow. 'Show me,' he whimpered. 'I too was once an artist, even I!' Dick
showed him the rough sketch. 'Am I that?' he screamed. 'Will you take
that away with you and show all the world that it is I,--Binat?' He
moaned and wept.
'Monsieur has paid for all,' said Madame. 'To the pleasure of seeing
Monsieur again.'
The courtyard gate shut, and Dick hurried up the sandy street to the
nearest gambling-hell, where he was well known. 'If the luck holds, it's
an omen; if I lose, I must stay here.' He placed his money picturesquely
about the board, hardly daring to look at what he did. The luck held.
Three turns of the wheel left him richer by twenty pounds, and he went
down to the shipping to make friends with the captain of a decayed
cargo-steamer, who landed him in London with fewer pounds in his
pocket than he cared to think about.
A thin gray fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for
summer was in England.
'It's a cheerful wilderness, and it hasn't the knack of altering much,' Dick
thought, as he tramped from the Docks westward. 'Now, what must I
do?'
The packed houses gave no answer. Dick looked down the long lightless
streets and at the appalling rush of traffic. 'Oh, you rabbit-hutches!' said
he, addressing a row of highly respectable semi-detached residences. 'Do
you know what you've got to do later on? You have to supply me with
men-servants and maid-servants,'--here he smacked his lips,--'and the
peculiar treasure of kings. Meantime I'll clothes and boots, and presently
I will return and trample on you.' He stepped forward energetically; he
saw that one of his shoes was burst at the side. As he stooped to make
investigations, a man jostled him into the gutter. 'All right,' he said.
'That's another nick in the score. I'll jostle you later on.'
Good clothes and boots are not cheap, and Dick left his last shop with the
certainty that he would be respectably arrayed for a time, but with only
fifty shillings in his pocket. He returned to streets by the Docks, and
lodged himself in one room, where the sheets on the bed were almost
audibly marked in case of theft, and where nobody seemed to go to bed at
all. When his clothes arrived he sought the Central Southern Syndicate
for Torpenhow's address, and got it, with the intimation that there was
still some money waiting for him.
'How much?' said Dick, as one who habitually dealt in millions.
'Between thirty and forty pounds. If it would be any convenience to you,
of course we could let you have it at once; but we usually settle accounts
monthly.'
'If I show that I want anything now, I'm lost,' he said to himself. 'All I
need I'll take later on.' Then, aloud, 'It's hardly worth while; and I'm
going to the country for a month, too. Wait till I come back, and I'll see
about it.'
'But we trust, Mr. Heldar, that you do not intend to sever your
connection with us?'
Dick's business in life was the study of faces, and he watched the speaker
keenly. 'That man means something,' he said. 'I'll do no business till I've
seen Torpenhow. There's a big deal coming.' So he departed, making no
promises, to his one little room by the Docks. And that day was the
seventh of the month, and that month, he reckoned with awful
distinctness, had thirty-one days in it!?
It is not easy for a man of catholic tastes and healthy appetites to exist for
twenty-four days on fifty shillings. Nor is it cheering to begin the
experiment alone in all the loneliness of London. Dick paid seven shillings
a week for his lodging, which left him rather less than a shilling a day for
food and drink. Naturally, his first purchase was of the materials of his
craft; he had been without them too long. Half a day's investigations and
comparison brought him to the conclusion that sausages and mashed
potatoes, twopence a plate, were the best food. Now, sausages once or
twice a week for breakfast are not unpleasant. As lunch, even, with
mashed potatoes, they become monotonous. At dinner they are
impertinent. At the end of three days Dick loathed sausages, and, going,
forth, pawned his watch to revel on sheep's head, which is not as cheap
as it looks, owing to the bones and the gravy. Then he returned to
sausages and mashed potatoes. Then he confined himself entirely to
mashed potatoes for a day, and was unhappy because of pain in his
inside. Then he pawned his waistcoat and his tie, and thought regretfully
of money thrown away in times past. There are few things more edifying
unto Art than the actual belly-pinch of hunger, and Dick in his few walks
abroad,--he did not care for exercise; it raised desires that could not be
satisfied--found himself dividing mankind into two classes,--those who
looked as if they might give him something to eat, and those who looked
otherwise. 'I never knew what I had to learn about the human face
before,' he thought; and, as a reward for his humility, Providence caused
a cab-driver at a sausage-shop where Dick fed that night to leave half
eaten a great chunk of bread. Dick took it,--would have fought all the
world for its possession,--and it cheered him.
The month dragged through at last, and, nearly prancing with
impatience, he went to draw his money. Then he hastened to
Torpenhow's address and smelt the smell of cooking meats all along the
corridors of the chambers. Torpenhow was on the top floor, and Dick
burst into his room, to be received with a hug which nearly cracked his
ribs, as Torpenhow dragged him tot he light and spoke of twenty
different things in the same breath.
'But you're looking tucked up,' he concluded.
'Got anything to eat?' said Dick, his eye roaming round the room.
'I shall be having breakfast in a minute. What do you say to sausages?'
'No, anything but sausages! Torp, I've been starving on that accursed
horse-flesh for thirty days and thirty nights.'
'Now, what lunacy has been your latest?'
Dick spoke of the last few weeks with unbridled speech. Then he opened
his coat; there was no waistcoat below. 'I ran it fine, awfully fine, but
I've just scraped through.'
'You haven't much sense, but you've got a backbone, anyhow. Eat, and
talk afterwards.' Dick fell upon eggs and bacon and gorged till he could
gorge no more. Torpenhow handed him a filled pipe, and he smoked as
men smoke who for three weeks have been deprived of good tobacco.
'Ouf!' said he. 'That's heavenly! Well?'
'Why in the world didn't you come to me?'
'Couldn't; I owe you too much already, old man. Besides I had a sort of
superstition that this temporary starvation--that's what it was, and it
hurt--would bring me luck later. It's over and done with now, and none
of the syndicate know how hard up I was. Fire away. What's the exact
state of affairs as regards myself?'
'You had my wire? You've caught on here. People like your work
immensely. I don't know why, but they do. They say you have a fresh
touch and a new way of drawing things. And, because they're chiefly
home-bred English, they say you have insight. You're wanted by half a
dozen papers; you're wanted to illustrate books.'
Dick grunted scornfully.
'You're wanted to work up your smaller sketches and sell them to the
dealers. They seem to think the money sunk in you is a good investment.
Good Lord! who can account for the fathomless folly of the public?'
'They're a remarkably sensible people.'
'They are subject to fits, if that's what you mean; and you happen to be
the object of the latest fit among those who are interested in what they
call Art. Just now you're a fashion, a phenomenon, or whatever you
please. I appeared to be the only person who knew anything about you
here, and I have been showing the most useful men a few of the sketches
you gave me from time to time. Those coming after your work on the
Central Southern Syndicate appear to have done your business. You're
in luck.'
'Huh! call it luck! Do call it luck, when a man has been kicking about the
world like a dog, waiting for it to come! I'll luck 'em later on. I want a
place to work first.'
'Come here,' said Torpenhow, crossing the landing. 'This place is a big
box room really, but it will do for you. There's your skylight, or your
north light, or whatever window you call it, and plenty of room to thrash
about in, and a bedroom beyond. What more do you need?'
'Good enough,' said Dick, looking round the large room that took up a
third of a top story in the rickety chambers overlooking the Thames. A
pale yellow sun shone through the skylight and showed the much dirt of
the place. Three steps led from the door to the landing, and three more to
Torpenhow's room. The well of the staircase disappeared into darkness,
pricked by tiny gas-jets, and there were sounds of men talking and doors
slamming seven flights below, in the warm gloom.
'Do they give you a free hand here?' said Dick, cautiously. He was
Ishmael enough to know the value of liberty.
'Anything you like; latch-keys and license unlimited. We are permanent
tenants for the most part here. 'Tisn't a place I would recommend for a
Young Men's Christian Association, but it will serve. I took these rooms
for you when I wired.'
'You're a great deal too kind, old man.'
'You didn't suppose you were going away from me, did you?' Torpenhow
put his hand on Dick's shoulder, and the two walked up and down the
room, henceforward to be called the studio, in sweet and silent
communion. They heard rapping at Torpenhow's door. 'That's some
ruffian come up for a drink,' said Torpenhow; and he raised his voice
cheerily. There entered no one more ruffianly than a portly middle-aged
gentleman in a satin-faced frockcoat. His lips were parted and pale, and
there were deep pouches under the eyes.
'Weak heart,' said Dick to himself, and, as he shook hands, 'very weak
heart. His pulse is shaking his fingers.'
The man introduced himself as the head of the Central Southern
Syndicate and 'one of the most ardent admirers of your work, Mr.
Heldar. I assure you, in the name of the syndicate, that we are immensely
indebted to you; and I trust, Mr. Heldar, you won't forget that we were
largely instrumental in bringing you before the public.' He panted
because of the seven flights of stairs.
Dick glanced at Torpenhow, whose left eyelid lay for a moment dead on
his cheek.
'I shan't forget,' said Dick, every instinct of defence roused in him.
'You've paid me so well that I couldn't, you know. By the way, when I
am settled in this place I should like to send and get my sketches. There
must be nearly a hundred and fifty of them with you.'
'That is er--is what I came to speak about. I fear we can't allow it
exactly, Mr. Heldar. In the absence of any specified agreement, the
sketches are our property, of course.'
'Do you mean to say that you are going to keep them?'
'Yes; and we hope to have your help, on your own terms, Mr. Heldar, to
assist us in arranging a little exhibition, which, backed by our name and
the influence we naturally command among the press, should be of
material service to you. Sketches such as yours----'
'Belong to me. You engaged me by wire, you paid me the lowest rates you
dared. You can't mean to keep them! Good God alive, man, they're all
I've got in the world!'
Torpenhow watched Dick's face and whistled.
Dick walked up and down, thinking. He saw the whole of his little stock
in trade, the first weapon of his equipment, annexed at the outset of his
campaign by an elderly gentleman whose name Dick had not caught
aright, who said that he represented a syndicate, which was a thing for
which Dick had not the least reverence. The injustice of the proceedings
did not much move him; he had seen the strong hand prevail too often in
other places to be squeamish over the moral aspects of right and wrong.
But he ardently desired the blood of the gentleman in the frockcoat, and
when he spoke again, and when he spoke again it was with a strained
sweetness that Torpenhow knew well for the beginning of strife.
'Forgive me, sir, but you have no--no younger man who can arrange this
business with me?'
'I speak for the syndicate. I see no reason for a third party to----'
'You will in a minute. Be good enough to give back my sketches.'
The man stared blankly at Dick, and then at Torpenhow, who was
leaning against the wall. He was not used to ex-employees who ordered
him to be good enough to do things.
'Yes, it is rather a cold-blooded steal,' said Torpenhow, critically; 'but
I'm afraid, I am very much afraid, you've struck the wrong man. Be
careful, Dick; remember, this isn't the Soudan.'
'Considering what services the syndicate have done you in putting your
name before the world----'
This was not a fortunate remark; it reminded Dick of certain vagrant
years lived out in loneliness and strife and unsatisfied desires. The
memory did not contrast well with the prosperous gentleman who
proposed to enjoy the fruit of those years.
'I don't know quite what to do with you,' began Dick, meditatively. 'Of
course you're a thief, and you ought to be half killed, but in your case
you'd probably die. I don't want you dead on this floor, and, besides, it's
unlucky just as one's moving in. Don't hit, sir; you'll only excite yourself.'
He put one hand on the man's forearm and ran the other down the plump
body beneath the coat. 'My goodness!' said he to Torpenhow, 'and this
gray oaf dares to be a thief! I have seen an Esneh camel-driver have the
black hide taken off his body in strips for stealing half a pound of wet
dates, and he was as tough as whipcord. This things' soft all over--like a
woman.'
There are few things more poignantly humiliating than being handled by
a man who does not intend to strike. The head of the syndicate began to
breathe heavily. Dick walked round him, pawing him, as a cat paws a soft
hearth-rug. Then he traced with his forefinger the leaden pouches
underneath the eyes, and shook his head. 'You were going to steal my
things,--mine, mine, mine!--you, who don't know when you may die.
Write a note to your office,--you say you're the head of it,--and order
them to give Torpenhow my sketches,--every one of them. Wait a minute:
your hand's shaking. Now!' He thrust a pocket-book before him. The note
was written. Torpenhow took it and departed without a word, while Dick
walked round and round the spellbound captive, giving him such advice
as he conceived best for the welfare of his soul. When Torpenhow
returned with a gigantic portfolio, he heard Dick say, almost soothingly,
'Now, I hope this will be a lesson to you; and if you worry me when I
have settled down to work with any nonsense about actions for assault,
believe me, I'll catch you and manhandle you, and you'll die. You haven't
very long to live, anyhow. Go! Imshi, Vootsak,--get out!' The man
departed, staggering and dazed. Dick drew a long breath: 'Phew! what a
lawless lot these people are! The first thing a poor orphan meets is gang
robbery, organised burglary! Think of the hideous blackness of that
man's mind! Are my sketches all right, Torp?'
'Yes; one hundred and forty-seven of them. Well, I must say, Dick, you've
begun well.'
'He was interfering with me. It only meant a few pounds to him, but it
was everything to me. I don't think he'll bring an action. I gave him some
medical advice gratis about the state of his body. It was cheap at the little
flurry it cost him. Now, let's look at my things.'
Two minutes later Dick had thrown himself down on the floor and was
deep in the portfolio, chuckling lovingly as he turned the drawings over
and thought of the price at which they had been bought.
The afternoon was well advanced when Torpenhow came to the door and
saw Dick dancing a wild saraband under the skylight.
'I builded better than I knew, Torp,' he said, without stopping the dance.
'They're good! They're damned good! They'll go like flame! I shall have
an exhibition of them on my own brazen hook. And that man would have
cheated me out of it! Do you know that I'm sorry now that I didn't
actually hit him?'
'Go out,' said Torpenhow,--'go out and pray to be delivered from the sin
of arrogance, which you never will be. Bring your things up from
whatever place you're staying in, and we'll try to make this barn a little
more shipshape.'
'And then--oh, then,' said Dick, still capering, 'we will spoil the
Egyptians!'?
CHAPTER IV
The wolf-cub at even lay hid in the corn,
When the smoke of the cooking hung gray:
He knew where the doe made a couch for her fawn,
And he looked to his strength for his prey.
But the moon swept the smoke-wreaths away.
And he turned from his meal in the villager's close,
And he bayed to the moon as she rose.--In Seonee.?
'WELL, and how does success taste?' said Torpenhow, some three
months later. He had just returned to chambers after a holiday in the
country.
'Good,' said Dick, as he sat licking his lips before the easel in the studio.
'I want more,--heaps more. The lean years have passed, and I approve of
these fat ones.'
'Be careful, old man. That way lies bad work.'
Torpenhow was sprawling in a long chair with a small fox-terrier asleep
on his chest, while Dick was preparing a canvas. A dais, a background,
and a lay-figure were the only fixed objects in the place. They rose from
a wreck of oddments that began with felt-covered water-bottles, belts,
and regimental badges, and ended with a small bale of second-hand
uniforms and a stand of mixed arms. The mark of muddy feet on the dais
showed that a military model had just gone away. The watery autumn
sunlight was falling, and shadows sat in the corners of the studio.
'Yes,' said Dick, deliberately, 'I like the power; I like the fun; I like the
fuss; and above all I like the money. I almost like the people who make
the fuss and pay the money. Almost. But they're a queer gang,--an
amazingly queer gang!'
'They have been good enough to you, at any rate. Than tin-pot exhibition
of your sketches must have paid. Did you see that the papers called it the
"Wild Work Show"?'
'Never mind. I sold every shred of canvas I wanted to; and, on my word,
I believe it was because they believed I was a self-taught flagstone artist.
I should have got better prices if I worked my things on wool or
scratched them on camel-bone instead of using mere black and white and
colour. Verily, they are a queer gang, these people. Limited isn't the
word to describe 'em. I met a fellow the other day who told me that it
was impossible that shadows on white sand should be
blue,--ultramarine,--as they are. I found out, later, that the man had been
as far as Brighton beach; but he knew all about Art, confound him. He
gave me a lecture on it, and recommended me to go to school to learn
technique. I wonder what old Kami would have said to that.'
'When were you under Kami, man of extraordinary beginnings?'
'I studied with him for two years in Paris. He taught by personal
magnetism. All he ever said was, "Continuez, mes enfants," and you had
to make the best you could of that. He had a divine touch, and he knew
something about colour. Kami used to dream colour; I swear he could
never have seen the genuine article; but he evolved it; and it was good.'
'Recollect some of those views in the Soudan?' said Torpenhow, with a
provoking drawl.
Dick squirmed in his place. 'Don't! It makes me want to get out there
again. What colour that was! Opal and umber and amber and claret and
brick-red and sulphur--cockatoo-crest--sulphur--against brown, with a
nigger-black rock sticking up in the middle of it all, and a decorative
frieze of camels festooning in front of a pure pale turquoise sky.' He
began to walk up and down. 'And yet, you know, if you try to give these
people the thing as God gave it, keyed down to their comprehension and
according to the powers He has given you----'
'Modest man! Go on.'
'Half a dozen epicene young pagans who haven't even been to Algiers
will tell you, first, that your notion is borrowed, and, secondly, that it
isn't Art.
''This comes of my leaving town for a month. Dickie, you've been
promenading among the toy-shops and hearing people talk.'
'I couldn't help it,' said Dick, penitently. 'You weren't here, and it was
lonely these long evenings. A man can't work for ever.'
'A man might have gone to a pub, and got decently drunk.'
'I wish I had; but I forgathered with some men of sorts. They said they
were artists, and I knew some of them could draw,--but they wouldn't
draw. They gave me tea,--tea at five in the afternoon!--and talked about
Art and the state of their souls. As if their souls mattered. I've heard
more about Art and seen less of her in the last six months than in the
whole of my life. Do you remember Cassavetti, who worked for some
continental syndicate, out with the desert column? He was a regular
Christmas-tree of contraptions when he took the field in full fig, with his
water-bottle, lanyard, revolver, writing-case, housewife, gig-lamps, and
the Lord knows what all. He used to fiddle about with 'em and show us
how they worked; but he never seemed to do much except fudge his
reports from the Nilghai. See?'
'Dear old Nilghai! He's in town, fatter than ever. He ought to be up here
this evening. I see the comparison perfectly. You should have kept clear
of all that man-millinery. Serves you right; and I hope it will unsettle
your mind.'
'It won't. It has taught me what Art--holy sacred Art--means.'
'You've learnt something while I've been away. What is Art?'
'Give 'em what they know, and when you've done it once do it again.'
Dick dragged forward a canvas laid face to the wall. 'Here's a sample of
real Art. It's going to be a facsimile reproduction for a weekly. I called it
"His Last Shot." It's worked up from the little water-colour I made
outside El Maghrib. Well, I lured my model, a beautiful rifleman, up
here with drink; I drored him, and I redrored him, and I redrored him,
and I made him a flushed, dishevelled, bedevilled scallawag, with his
helmet at the back of his head, and the living fear of death in his eye, and
the blood oozing out of a cut over his ankle-bone. He wasn't pretty, but
he was all soldier and very much man.'
'Once more, modest child!'
Dick laughed. 'Well, it's only to you I'm talking. I did him just as well as
I knew how, making allowance for the slickness of oils. Then the
art-manager of that abandoned paper said that his subscribers wouldn't
like it. It was brutal and coarse and violent,--man being naturally gentle
when he's fighting for his life. They wanted something more restful, with
a little more colour. I could have said a good deal, but you might as well
talk to a sheep as an art-manager. I took my "Last Shot" back. Behold
the result! I put him into a lovely red coat without a speck on it. That is
Art. I polished his boots,--observe the high light on the toe. That is Art. I
cleaned his rifle,--rifles are always clean on service,--because that is Art.
I pipeclayed his helmet,--pipeclay is always used on active service, and is
indispensable to Art. I shaved his chin, I washed his hands, and gave him
an air of fatted peace. Result, military tailor's pattern-plate. Price, thank
Heaven, twice as much as for the first sketch, which was moderately
decent.'
'And do you suppose you're going to give that thing out as your work?'
'Why not? I did it. Alone I did it, in the interests of sacred, home-bred
Art and Dickenson's Weekly.'
Torpenhow smoked in silence for a while. Then came the verdict,
delivered from rolling clouds: 'If you were only a mass of blathering
vanity, Dick, I wouldn't mind,--I'd let you go to the deuce on your own
mahl-stick; but when I consider what you are to me, and when I find that
to vanity you add the twopenny-halfpenny pique of a twelve-year-old
girl, then I bestir myself in your behalf. Thus!'
The canvas ripped as Torpenhow's booted foot shot through it, and the
terrier jumped down, thinking rats were about.
'If you have any bad language to use, use it. You have not. I continue.
You are an idiot, because no man born of woman is strong enough to take
liberties with his public, even though they be--which they ain't--all you
say they are.'
'But they don't know any better. What can you expect from creatures
born and bred in this light?' Dick pointed to the yellow fog. 'If they want
furniture-polish, let them have furniture-polish, so long as they pay for it.
They are only men and women. You talk as if they were gods.'
'That sounds very fine, but it has nothing to do with the case. They are
they people you have to do work for, whether you like it or not. They are
your masters. Don't be deceived, Dickie, you aren't strong enough to
trifle with them,--or with yourself, which is more important.
Moreover,--Come back, Binkie: that red daub isn't going
anywhere,--unless you take precious good care, you will fall under the
damnation of the check-book, and that's worse than death. You will get
drunk--you-re half drunk already--on easily acquired money. For that
money and you own infernal vanity you are willing to deliberately turn
out bad work. You'll do quite enough bad work without knowing it. And,
Dickie, as I love you and as I know you love me, I am not going to let you
cut off your nose to spite your face for all the gold in England. That's
settled. Now swear.'
'Don't know, said Dick. 'I've been trying to make myself angry, but I
can't, you're so abominably reasonable. There will be a row on
Dickenson's Weekly, I fancy.'
'Why the Dickenson do you want to work on a weekly paper? It's slow
bleeding of power.'
'It brings in the very desirable dollars,' said Dick, his hands in his
pockets.
Torpenhow watched him with large contempt. 'Why, I thought it was a
man!' said he. 'It's a child.'
'No, it isn't,' said Dick, wheeling quickly. 'You've no notion owhat the
certainty of cash means to a man who has always wanted it badly.
Nothing will pay me for some of my life's joys; on that Chinese pig-boat,
for instance, when we ate bread and jam for every meal, because
Ho-Wang wouldn't allow us anything better, and it all tasted of
pig,--Chinese pig. I've worked for this, I've sweated and I've starved for
this, line on line and month after month. And now I've got it I am going
to make the most of it while it lasts. Let them pay--they've no knowledge.'
'What does Your Majesty please to want? You can't smoke more than
you do; you won't drink; you're a gross feeder; and you dress in the
dark, by the look of you. You wouldn't keep a horse the other day when I
suggested, because, you said, it might fall lame, and whenever you cross
the street you take a hansom. Even you are not foolish enough to suppose
that theatres and all the live things you can by thereabouts mean Life.
What earthly need have you for money?'
'It's there, bless its golden heart,' said Dick. 'It's there all the time.
Providence has sent me nuts while I have teeth to crack 'em with. I
haven't yet found the nut I wish to crack, but I'm keeping my teeth filed.
Perhaps some day you and I will go for a walk round the wide earth.'
'With no work to do, nobody to worry us, and nobody to compete with?
You would be unfit to speak to in a week. Besides, I shouldn't go. I don't
care to profit by the price of a man's soul,--for that's what it would mean.
Dick, it's no use arguing. You're a fool.'
'Don't see it. When I was on that Chinese pig-boat, our captain got credit
for saving about twenty-five thousand very seasick little pigs, when our
old tramp of a steamer fell foul of a timber-junk. Now, taking those pigs
as a parallel----'
'Oh, confound your parallels! Whenever I try to improve your soul, you
always drag in some anecdote from your very shady past. Pigs aren't the
British public; and self-respect is self-respect the world over. Go out for
a walk and try to catch some self-respect. And, I say, if the Nilghai comes
up this evening can I show him your diggings?'
'Surely.' And Dick departed, to take counsel with himself in the rapidly
gathering London fog.
Half an hour after he had left, the Nilghai laboured up the staircase. He
was the chiefest, as he was the youngest, of the war correspondents, and
his experiences dated from the birth of the needle-gun. Saving only his
ally, Keneu the Great War Eagle, there was no man higher in the craft
than he, and he always opened his conversation with the news that there
would be trouble in the Balkans in the spring. Torpenhow laughed as he
entered.
'Never mind the trouble in the Balkans. Those little states are always
screeching. You've heard about Dick's luck?'
'Yes; he has been called up to notoriety, hasn't he? I hope you keep him
properly humble. He wants suppressing from time to time.'
'He does. He's beginning to take liberties with what he thinks is his
reputation.'
'Already! By Jove, he has cheek! I don't know about his reputation, but
he'll come a cropper if he tries that sort of thing.'
'So I told him. I don't think he believes it.'
'They never do when they first start off. What's that wreck on the
ground there?'
'Specimen of his latest impertinence.' Torpenhow thrust the torn edges of
the canvas together and showed the well-groomed picture to the Nilghai,
who looked at it for a moment and whistled.
'It's a chromo,' said he,--'a chromo-litholeomargarine fake! What
possessed him to do it? And yet how thoroughly he has caught the note
that catches a public who think with their boots and read with their
elbows! The cold-blooded insolence of the work almost saves it; but he
mustn't go on with this. Hasn't he been praised and cockered up too
much? You know these people here have no sense of proportion. They'll
call him a second Detaille and a third-hand Meissonier while his fashion
lasts. It's windy diet for a colt.'
'I don't think it affects Dick much. You might as well call a young wolf a
lion and expect him to take the compliment in exchange for a shin-bone.
Dick's soul is in the bank. He's working for cash.'
'Now he has thrown up war work, I suppose he doesn't see that the
obligations of the service are just the same, only the proprietors are
changed.'
'How should he know? He thinks he is his own master.'
'Does he? I could undeceive him for his good, if there's any virtue in
print. He wants the whiplash.'
'Lay it on with science, then. I'd flay him myself, but I like him too
much.'
'I've no scruples. He had the audacity to try to cut me out with a woman
at Cairo once. I forgot that, but I remember now.'
'Did he cut you out?'
'You'll see when I have dealt with him. But, after all, what's the good?
Leave him alone and he'll come home, if he has any stuff in him,
dragging or wagging his tail behind him. There's more in a week of life
than in a lively weekly. None the less I'll slate him. I'll slate him
ponderously in the Cataclysm.'
'Good luck to you; but I fancy nothing short of a crowbar would make
Dick wince. His soul seems to have been fired before we came across him.
He's intensely suspicious and utterly lawless.'
'Matter of temper,' said the Nilghai. 'It's the same with horses. Some you
wallop and they work, some you wallop and they jib, and some you
wallop and they go out for a walk with their hands in their pockets.'
'That's exactly what Dick has done,' said Torpenhow. 'Wait till he comes
back. In the meantime, you can begin your slating here. I'll show you
some of his last and worst work in his studio.'
Dick had instinctively sought running water for a comfort to his mood of
mind. He was leaning over the Embankment wall, watching the rush of
the Thames through the arches of Westminster Bridge. He began by
thinking of Torpenhow's advice, but, as of custom, lost himself in the
study of the faces flocking past. Some had death written on their
features, and Dick marvelled that they could laugh. Others, clumsy and
coarse-built for the most part, were alight with love; others were merely
drawn and lined with work; but there was something, Dick knew, to be
made out of them all. The poor at least should suffer that he might learn,
and the rich should pay for the output of his learning. Thus his credit in
the world and his cash balance at the bank would be increased. So much
the better for him. He had suffered. Now he would take toll of the ills of
others.
The fog was driven apart for a moment, and the sun shone, a blood-red
wafer, on the water. Dick watched the spot till he heard the voice of the
tide between the piers die down like the wash of the sea at low tide. A girl
hard pressed by her lover shouted shamelessly, 'Ah, get away, you beast!'
and a shift of the same wind that had opened the fog drove across Dick's
face the black smoke of a river-steamer at her berth below the wall. He
was blinded for the moment, then spun round and found himself face to
face with--Maisie.
There was no mistaking. The years had turned the child to a woman, but
they had not altered the dark-gray eyes, the thin scarlet lips, or the
firmly modelled mouth and chin; and, that all should be as it was of old,
she wore a closely fitting gray dress.
Since the human soul is finite and not in the least under its own
command, Dick, advancing, said 'Halloo!' after the manner of
schoolboys, and Maisie answered, 'Oh, Dick, is that you?' Then, against
his will, and before the brain newly released from considerations of the
cash balance had time to dictate to the nerves, every pulse of Dick's body
throbbed furiously and his palate dried in his mouth. The fog shut down
again, and Maisie's face was pearl-white through it. No word was
spoken, but Dick fell into step at her side, and the two paced the
Embankment together, keeping the step as perfectly as in their afternoon
excursions to the mud-flats. Then Dick, a little hoarsely--
'What has happened to Amomma?'
'He died, Dick. Not cartridges; over-eating. He was always greedy. Isn't
it funny?'
'Yes. No. Do you mean Amomma?'
'Ye--es. No. This. Where have you come from?'
'Over there,' He pointed eastward through the fog. 'And you?'
'Oh, I'm in the north,--the black north, across all the Park. I am very
busy.'
'What do you do?'
'I paint a great deal. That's all I have to do.'
'Why, what's happened? You had three hundred a year.'
'I have that still. I am painting; that's all.'
'Are you alone, then?'
'There's a girl living with me. Don't walk so fast, Dick; you're out of
step.'
'Then you noticed it too?'
'Of course I did. You're always out of step.'
'So I am. I'm sorry. You went on with the painting?'
'Of course. I said I should. I was at the Slade, then at Merton's in St.
John's Wood, the big studio, then I pepper-potted,--I mean I went to the
National,--and now I'm working under Kami.'
'But Kami is in Paris surely?'
'No; he has his teaching studio in Vitry-sur-Marne. I work with him in
the summer, and I live in London in the winter. I'm a householder.'
'Do you sell much?'
'Now and again, but not often. There is my 'bus. I must take it or lose
half an hour. Good-bye, Dick.'
'Good-bye, Maisie. Won't you tell me where you live? I must see you
again; and perhaps I could help you. I--I paint a little myself.'
'I may be in the Park to-morrow, if there is no working light. I walk from
the Marble Arch down and back again; that is my little excursion. But of
course I shall see you again.' She stepped into the omnibus and was
swallowed up by the fog.
'Well--I--am--damned!' exclaimed Dick, and returned to the chambers.
Torpenhow and the Nilghai found him sitting on the steps to the stgudio
door, repeating the phrase with an awful gravity.
'You'll be more damned when I'm done with you,' said the Nilghai,
upheaving his bulk from behind Torpenhow's shoulder and waving a
sheaf of half-dry manuscript. 'Dick, it is of common report that you are
suffering from swelled head.'
'Halloo, Nilghai. Back again? How are the Balkans and all the little
Balkans? One side of your face is out of drawing, as usual.'
'Never mind that. I am commissioned to smite you in print. Torpenhow
refuses from false delicacy. I've been overhauling the pot-boilers in your
studio. They are simply disgraceful.'
'Oho! that's it, is it? If you think you can slate me, you're wrong. You
can only describe, and you need as much room to turn in, on paper, as a
P. and O. cargo-boat. But continue, and be swift. I'm going to bed.'
'H'm! h'm! h'm! The first part only deals with your pictures. Here's the
peroration: "For work done without conviction, for power wasted on
trivialities, for labour expended with levity for the deliberate purpose of
winning the easy applause of a fashion-driven public----"
'That's "His Last Shot," second edition. Go on.'
'----"public, there remains but one end,--the oblivion that is preceded by
toleration and cenotaphed with contempt. From that fate Mr. Heldar has
yet to prove himself out of danger.'
'Wow--wow--wow--wow--wow!' said Dick, profanely. 'It's a clumsy ending
and vile journalese, but it's quite true. And yet,'--he sprang to his feet
and snatched at the manuscript,--'you scarred, deboshed, battered old
gladiator! you're sent out when a war begins, to minister to the blind,
brutal, British public's bestial thirst for blood. They have no arenas now,
but they must have special correspondents. You're a fat gladiator who
comes up through a trap-door and talks of what he's seen. You stand on
precisely the same level as an energetic bishop, an affable actress, a
devastating cyclone, or--mine own sweet self. And you presume to lecture
me about my work! Nilghai, if it were worth while I'd caricature you in
four papers!'
The Nilghai winced. He had not thought of this.
'As it is, I shall take this stuff and tear it small--so!' The manuscript
fluttered in slips down the dark well of the staircase. 'Go home, Nilghai,'
said Dick; 'go home to your lonely little bed, and leave me in peace. I am
about to turn in till to-morrow.'
'Why, it isn't seven yet!' said Torpenhow, with amazement.
'It shall be two in the morning, if I choose,' said Dick, backing to the
studio door. 'I go to grapple with a serious crisis, and I shan't want any
dinner.'
The door shut and was locked.
'What can you do with a man like that?' said the Nilghai.
'Leave him alone. He's as mad as a hatter.'
At eleven there was a kicking on the studio door. 'Is the Nilghai with you
still?' said a voice from within. 'Then tell him he might have condensed
the whole of his lumbering nonsense into an epigram: "Only the free are
bond, and only the bond are free." Tell him he's an idiot, Torp, and tell
him I'm another.'
'All right. Come out and have supper. You're smoking on an empty
stomach.'
There was no answer.
CHAPTER V
'I have a thousand men,' said he,
'To wait upon my will,
And towers nine upon the Tyne,
And three upon the Till.'?
'And what care I for you men,' said she,
'Or towers from Tyne to Till,
Sith you must go with me,' she said,
'To wait upon my will?'
Sir Hoggie and the Fairies
NEXT morning Torpenhow found Dick sunk in deepest repose of
tobacco.
'Well, madman, how d'you feel?'
'I don't know. I'm trying to find out.'
'You had much better do some work.'
'Maybe; but I'm in no hurry. I've made a discovery. Torp, there's too
much Ego in my Cosmos.'
'Not really! Is this revelation due to my lectures, or the Nilghai's?'
'It came to me suddenly, all on my own account. Much too much Ego;
and now I'm going to work.'
He turned over a few half-finished sketches, drummed on a new canvas,
cleaned three brushes, set Binkie to bite the toes of the lay figure, rattled
through his collection of arms and accoutrements, and then went out
abruptly, declaring that he had done enough for the day.
'This is positively indecent,' said Torpenhow, 'and the first time that
Dick has ever broken up a light morning. Perhaps he has found out that
he has a soul, or an artistic temperament, or something equally valuable.
That comes of leaving him alone for a month. Perhaps he has been going
out of evenings. I must look to this.' He rang for the bald-headed old
housekeeper, whom nothing could astonish or annoy.
'Beeton, did Mr. Heldar dine out at all while I was out of town?'
'Never laid 'is dress-clothes out once, sir, all the time. Mostly 'e dined in;
but 'e brought some most remarkable young gentlemen up 'ere after
theatres once or twice. Remarkable fancy they was. You gentlemen on
the top floor does very much as you likes, but it do seem to me, sir,
droppin' a walkin'-stick down five flights o' stairs an' then goin' down
four abreast to pick it up again at half-past two in the mornin', singin'
"Bring back the whiskey, Willie darlin,'"--not once or twice, but scores
o' times,--isn't charity to the other tenants. What I say is, "Do as you
would be done by." That's my motto.'
'Of course! of course! I'm afraid the top floor isn't the quietest in the
house.'
'I make no complaints, sir. I have spoke to Mr. Heldar friendly, an' he
laughed, an' did me a picture of the missis that is as good as a coloured
print. It 'asn't the high shine of a photograph, but what I say is, "Never
look a gift-horse in the mouth." Mr. Heldar's dress-clothes 'aven't been
on him for weeks.'
'Then it's all right,' said Torpenhow to himself. 'Orgies are healthy, and
Dick has a head of his own, but when it comes to women making eyes I'm
not so certain,--Binkie, never you be a man, little dorglums. They're
contrary brutes, and they do things without any reason.'
Dick had turned northward across the Park, but he was walking in the
spirit on the mud-flats with Maisie. He laughed aloud as he remembered
the day when he had decked Amomma's horns with the ham-frills, and
Maisie, white with rage, had cuffed him. How long those four years
seemed in review, and how closely Maisie was connected with every hour
of them! Storm across the sea, and Maisie in a gray dress on the beach,
sweeping her drenched hair out of her eyes and laughing at the
homeward race of the fishing-smacks; hot sunshine on the mud-flats, and
Maisie sniffing scornfully, with her chin in the air; Maisie flying before
the wind that threshed the foreshore and drove the sand like small shot
about her ears; Maisie, very composed and independent, telling lies to
Mrs. Jennett while Dick supported her with coarser perjuries; Maisie
picking her way delicately from stone to stone, a pistol in her hand and
her teeth firm-set; and Maisie in a gray dress sitting on the grass
between the mouth of a cannon and a nodding yellow sea-poppy. The
pictures passed before him one by one, and the last stayed the longest.
Dick was perfectly happy with a quiet peace that was as new to his mind
as it was foreign to his experiences. It never occurred to him that there
might be other calls upon his time than loafing across the Park in the
forenoon.
'There's a good working light now,' he said, watching his shadow
placidly. 'Some poor devil ought to be grateful for this. And there's
Maisie.'
She was walking towards him from the Marble Arch, and he saw that no
mannerism of her gait had been changed. It was good to find her still
Maisie, and, so to speak, his next-door neighbour. No greeting passed
between them, because there had been none in the old days.
'What are you doing out of your studio at this hour?' said Dick, as one
who was entitled to ask.
'Idling. Just idling. I got angry with a chin and scraped it out. Then I left
it in a little heap of paint-chips and came away.'
'I know what palette-knifing means. What was the piccy?'
'A fancy head that wouldn't come right,--horrid thing!'
'I don't like working over scraped paint when I'm doing flesh. The grain
comes up woolly as the paint dries.'
'Not if you scrape properly.' Maisie waved her hand to illustrate her
methods. There was a dab of paint on the white cuff. Dick laughed.
'You're as untidy as ever.'
'That comes well from you. Look at your own cuff.'
'By Jove, yes! It's worse than yours. I don't think we've much altered in
anything. Let's see, though.' He looked at Maisie critically. The pale blue
haze of an autumn day crept between the tree-trunks of the Park and
made a background for the gray dress, the black velvet toque above the
black hair, and the resolute profile.
'No, there's nothing changed. How good it is! D'you remember when I
fastened your hair into the snap of a hand-bag?'
Maisie nodded, with a twinkle in her eyes, and turned her full face to
Dick.
'Wait a minute,' said he. 'That mouth is down at the corners a little.
Who's been worrying you, Maisie?'
'No one but myself. I never seem to get on with my work, and yet I try
hard enough, and Kami says----'
'"Continuez, mesdemoiselles. Continuez toujours, mes enfants." Kami is
depressing. I beg your pardon.'
'Yes, that's what he says. He told me last summer that I was doing better
and he'd let me exhibit this year.'
'Not in this place, surely?'
'Of course not. The Salon.'
'You fly high.'
'I've been beating my wings long enough. Where do you exhibit, Dick?'
'I don't exhibit. I sell.'
'What is your line, then?'
'Haven't you heard?' Dick's eyes opened. Was this thing possible? He
cast about for some means of conviction. They were not far from the
Marble Arch. 'Come up Oxford Street a little and I'll show you.'
A small knot of people stood round a print-shop that Dick knew well.
'Some reproduction of my work inside,' he said, with suppressed
triumph. Never before had success tasted so sweet upon the tongue. 'You
see the sort of things I paint. D'you like it?'
Maisie looked at the wild whirling rush of a field-battery going into
action under fire. Two artillery-men stood behind her in the crowd.
'They've chucked the off lead-'orse' said one to the other. ''E's tore up
awful, but they're makin' good time with the others. That lead-driver
drives better nor you, Tom. See 'ow cunnin' 'e's nursin' 'is 'orse.'
'Number Three'll be off the limber, next jolt,' was the answer.
'No, 'e won't. See 'ow 'is foot's braced against the iron? 'E's all right.'
Dick watched Maisie's face and swelled with joy--fine, rank, vulgar
triumph. She was more interested in the little crowd than in the picture.
That was something that she could understand.
'And I wanted it so! Oh, I did want it so!' she said at last, under her
breath.
'Me,--all me!' said Dick, placidly. 'Look at their faces. It hits 'em. They
don't know what makes their eyes and mouths open; but I know. And I
know my work's right.'
'Yes. I see. Oh, what a thing to have come to one!'
'Come to one, indeed! I had to go out and look for it. What do you think?'
'I call it success. Tell me how you got it.'
They returned to the Park, and Dick delivered himself of the saga of his
own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman.
From the beginning he told the tale, the I--I--I's flashing through the
records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and
nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her a
hair's-breadth. At the end of each canto he would conclude, 'And that
gave me some notion of handling colour,' or light, or whatever it might
be that he had set out to pursue and understand. He led her breathless
across half the world, speaking as he had never spoken in his life before.
And in the flood-tide of his exaltation there came upon him a great desire
to pick up this maiden who nodded her head and said, 'I understand. Go
on,'--to pick her up and carry her away with him, because she was
Maisie, and because she understood, and because she was his right, and a
woman to be desired above all women.
Then he checked himself abruptly. 'And so I took all I wanted,' he said,
'and I had to fight for it. Now you tell.'
Maisie's tale was almost as gray as her dress. It covered years of patient
toil backed by savage pride that would not be broken thought dealers
laughed, and fogs delayed work, and Kami was unkind and even
sarcastic, and girls in other studios were painfully polite. It had a few
bright spots, in pictures accepted at provincial exhibitions, but it wound
up with the oft repeated wail, 'And so you see, Dick, I had no success,
though I worked so hard.'
Then pity filled Dick. Even thus had Maisie spoken when she could not
hit the breakwater, half an hour before she had kissed him. And that had
happened yesterday.
'Never mind,' he said. 'I'll tell you something, if you'll believe it.' The
words were shaping themselves of their own accord. 'The whole thing,
lock, stock, and barrel, isn't worth one big yellow sea-poppy below Fort
Keeling.'
Maisie flushed a little. 'It's all very well for you to talk, but you've had
the success and I haven't.'
'Let me talk, then. I know you'll understand. Maisie, dear, it sounds a bit
absurd, but5 those ten years never existed, and I've come back again. It
really is just the same. Can't you see? You're alone now and I'm alone.
What's the use of worrying? Come to me instead, darling.'
Maisie poked the gravel with her parasol. They were sitting on a bench.
'I understand,' she said slowly. 'But I've got my work to do, and I must
do it.'
'Do it with me, then, dear. I won't interrupt.'
'No, I couldn't. It's my work,--mine,--mine,--mine! I've been alone all my
life in myself, and I'm not going to belong to anybody except myself. I
remember things as well as you do, but that doesn't count. We were
babies then, and we didn't know what was before us. Dick, don't be
selfish. I think I see my way to a little success next year. Don't take it
away from me.'
'I beg your pardon, darling. It's my fault for speaking stupidly. I can't
expect you to throw up all your life just because I'm back. I'll go to my
own place and wait a little.'
'But, Dick, I don't want you to--go--out of--my life, now you've just come
back.'
'I'm at your orders; forgive me.' Dick devoured the troubled little face
with his eyes. There was triumph in them, because he could not conceive
that Maisie should refuse sooner or later to love him, since he loved her.
'It's wrong of me,' said Maisie, more slowly than before; 'it's wrong and
selfish; but, oh, I've been so lonely! No, you misunderstand. Now I've
seen you again,--it's absurd, but I want to keep you in my life.'
'Naturally. We belong.'
'We don't; but you always understood me, and there is so much in my
work that you could help me in. You know things and the ways of doing
things. You must.'
'I do, I fancy, or else I don't know myself. Then you won't care to lose
sight of me altogether, and--you want me to help you in your work?'
'Yes; but remember, Dick, nothing will ever come of it. That's why I feel
so selfish. Can't things stay as they are? I do want your help.'
'You shall have it. But let's consider. I must see your pics first, and
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